Bayer has gained control of the BlueRock stem cell joint venture

three years after its founding, Bayer bought private equity partner Versant Ventures for $240 million and BlueRock Therapeutics, a founding joint venture for cell therapy.
The decision gives Bayer full control of the BlueRock cell therapy pipeline, led by Parkinson's disease candidates, and will begin clinical trials of the disease this year, covering a variety of diseases in the neurology, cardiology and immunology categories.
BlueRock was founded at the end of 2016 with a $225 million start-up fund from Bayer and investment firm Versant, shortly after Bayer supported gene editing specialist Casebia through its investment division.
Bayer has since taken a 41 per cent stake in the company, and overall control suggests it is impressed with Bluerock's built-in induced pluripotent stem cell (ipscs) platform.
In addition to the $240 million acquisition fee, Bayer agreed to pay Versant an additional $360 million for various preclinical and early clinical development milestones in the pipeline program. The deal values BlueRock at about $1 billion.
The main project for Parkinson's disease focuses on Bluerock's ability to encourage PSCs to differentiate into dopamine-energy neurons, which are gradually destroyed in the disease. It is hoped that introducing these neurons into depleted areas of the brain will lead to increased dopamine release and the restoration of motor function.
BlueRock has also developed stem cells for neurology, differentiated into small glial cells, less protrusive glial cells and neurons, heart muscle cells for the treatment of heart failure, and macrophages and t-regulated cells for immunology, including immunoalysorption, fibrosis, and graft anti-host disease (gvhd).
Kemal Malik, a bayer innovation board member, said that while the control joint venture was not the company's only attempt to enter stem cell therapy, it represented a combination based on stem cell therapy.
In April, Bayer Leap made an unannoled investment in Khloris Biosciences, a U.S. biotech company that uses iPSC as a preventive and therapeutic vaccine and as a carrier of tumor-related antigens.A few weeks later, the venture capital division invested $215 million in Century Therapeutics, which was supported by Versant and Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics. The start-up plans to develop a t-cell therapy for blood cancer and stem cell-based solid tumors. （cyy123.com）